Living in the Cloud

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always dreamed of touching the clouds and walking and living in them and I’m sure many people wanted to do something like this when they were young.

Years later and with the advancement of the modern technologies available to us nowadays, our dreams started to come true, without the need to fly, now we can live in a cloud, a tech cloud called (cloud computing).

Cloud Computing:

Cloud computing is a relatively new phrase that describes services and products managed, delivered, and stored online “on the cloud”, these services and products requires almost nothing from the user’s local PC hardware and software. All the resources, software, and information are available on the cloud.

The services and products available on the cloud can be flexible to modification, cost-effective, reliable, and secure.

The best example, and the subject of this article is Apple’s new iCloud service.

iCloud:

iCloud is a Cloud service provided by Apple to allow its users to store their data online, and sync them between their devices. Using this service you can store you music, photos, apps, emails, calendars, documents, bookmarks and more, and sync them to you iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, Mac, and PC automatically. iCloud is replacing Apple’s old service “MobileMe”.

How does it work:

Registering to iCloud gives you 5GBs of free storage, you can backup and store all your data online for free, and the best thing here is your music, apps, books, and TV shows, as well as your Photo Stream will not affect your free iCloud storage because they’re already stored on Apple’s data centers.

If 5GB is not enough to store your data, you can easily pay for up to 50GB of storage.

iTunes match:

Another amazing feature on Apple’s iCloud service is iTunes match, using this paid service you can sync any song from your collection with your other devices, if available in the iTunes store – including music from a CD, from iTunes store, or from any other sources -, so you can enjoy your music without having to manually sync them with each one of your devices.

iCloudÂ is in Beta:

The iCloud service is in Beta mode for now, which means only registered iOS developers can use it, and it will be available to the public this fall when Apple releases its iOS 5.